Slashdot Mirror
How To Vet Clever Ideas Without Giving Them Away?
Rival writes "As an inquisitive and creative geek, I am constantly coming up with 'clever' ideas. Most often I discover fundamental or practical flaws lurking in the details, which I'm fine with. As Edison said, 'I haven't failed; I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.' Other times, I discover that someone else has beaten me to the idea. I'm fine with that, too. At least I know that I've come up with a great idea, even if I'm not the first. There are times, however, when I can find no flaws with an idea and nobody else seems to have thought of it. I'm not conceited enough to think my idea is genius; I just assume that I'm not knowledgeable enough to see what I'm missing. In these times, I often want to ask a subject matter expert for their thoughts. On the admittedly long chance that an idea is genius, however, what is the best way to ask for another's insights while mitigating the risk of them stealing or sharing the idea? Asking a stranger to sign a contract before discussing an idea seems like a good way to get a door closed on my face. What are your experiences and suggestions?"
$100, no lawyer needed.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Anyway, that irrelevant nonsense aside, I'm busy working on a high performance V-8 hemi engine powered by babies. I'm having some troubles with the baby pump getting clogged by babies ...
That's absurd, everyone knows that kittens have a higher Joule per liter ratio than babies. Do you know what the incubation time on a baby is? Nine months! Compare that to the three months tops on a kitten. And you only get one or two babies per baby producing mother. Kittens come in litters, litters equal more fuel. Burning babies in an engine!? What a preposterous idea!
You obviously haven't thought this out! Now if you can get your hands on some panda babies or endangered snow leopard, then you'd be in business!
My work here is dung.
You shouldn't expect to get a NDA for nothing. Pay them some $$$ as a 'review' fee to discuss the idea with you, and the NDA is built into your agreement with them.
What do you mean, I'm not a beautiful and unique snowflake? :-) But seriously, I didn't intend to come across arrogantly. Everybody brainstorms and has "Aha!" moments, and I thought that others might find the discussion on this article useful and informative.
To respond to a previous poster, convincing a woman doesn't sound stupid or insulting at all; it sounds sensible. Their problem-solving methods often differ from mens', and differing viewpoints are what you want when vetting an idea.
I regularly ask my wife for feedback on my ideas. She is quite grounded and realistic, and often sees practical flaws that I miss. Our discussions give me new ways of thinking about an idea, and regularly lead to discoveries and improvements which I may not have thought of before.
He applied for a patent.
That's the key. Nowadays, getting a patent with a good patent attorney costs 20-100K. Expect 4-6 rounds of revisions with the patent office, not counting international protection. Then, you have to sue the people, and have the money to pay the lawyers to get to the judgement (how long did the echostar/tivo case go? 7 years?). Then, you have to win. If you have enough money to pull all this off, then yes, it's very profitable.
And sometimes you could do nothing wrong. Atari should have lead the way with games consoles not the Japanese who have only copied everyone else and to this day all the jap consoles are based on nVidia, ATI, intel, IBM chipsets (all N. American) This was through no fault in the inventor, it was corporate corruption, and crappy business practices.. You also need a bit of luck.
The Japanese in general are a good case study in how to properly run a business, unlike American companies. The Japanese certainly didn't invent cars either, but they listened to the right people and figured out how to make companies to build some of the highest-quality, best-value cars on the planet. One notable figure in Japanese business history is W. Edwards Deming, an American who taught many Japanese businesses his ideas for running companies and improving quality control using statistics. American companies completely ignored him (though his ideas were used successfully in WWII for producing ammunition in the US), but the Japanese listened, and applied his ideas. He was a bit of a celebrity over there because of his contributions. Even after all these years, however, those of us working in American corporations are still stuck with idiotic management paradigms such as MBO (management by objectives) which Deming correctly derided.
The lesson here is that you don't have to be a genius to recognize a good idea and to run a very successful business. You just have to work hard and make good decisions (and not make stupid blunders), something that many American companies seem to have a big problem with, as seen by the melt-down in the American automakers recently.
A burp tank you probably know as the "overflow tank", or "coolant reservoir".
Im the founder/ceo of a funded tech startup.
Let me share some advice I learned the hard way:
Share your great ideas promiscuously as possible to attract collaborators, even in highly specialised science and engineering fields.
Otherwise your ideas will never gain traction and actually happen, and you will always be a dreamer.
In the unlikely event that someone steals your idea, take it as a compliment and move on to the next great idea.
Great ideas are easy to come up with. It's the execution that's the tough part. Startups are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Unless only 1-2 people in the world understand what your talking about, pretty much anything you communicate verbally is not going to have
much value to a competitor.The vast majority of the time secrecy is extremely toxic and harmful to getting an idea off the ground.
Although that would attenuate the radiation, it would scatter it more than anything else. What you should to do is surround the microwave with water. Build an aquarium-withing-an-aquarium and place the microwave in there. For best results, build the contraption out of PVC rather than metal, since, again, metal will cause scattering. If you want to do something until you've built the container, place water jugs around the microwave. It's not perfect, but it will greatly reduce the interference.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.